The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

89 use of video banking across all our business lines,” said Frank Verkerk, chief digital officer at ABN AMRO, in a recent Microsoft case study. “Requests from advisors to use Microsoft video technology increased, and we onboarded other products and businesses. Now, we have 3,000 advisors using the solution.” As a result, in the second quarter of 2020, 96 per cent of ABNAMRO’s interactions with customers took place virtually – an increase in video bank- ing sessions of 32 per cent. The bank believes that this success of digital channels, including video banking, has driven customer loyalty and com- petitive advantage. In fact, despite the lockdown, 59 per cent of its customers felt they could do their banking anytime, anywhere. “ABN AMRO has an ambition to be one of the best remote banks in the world,” said Verkerk. “As we add more and more Teams meeting functionality to our video-enabled banking, we’re on the right track to achieve that goal.” And ABM AMRO is just one of many success stories.At thestartof thepandemic,Germanfinan- cial services firm Aareal Bank realised it needed a level of digital collaboration and communication beyond the scope of its existing solutions. As a result, it decided to implement Microsoft Teams. In just two weeks it stabilised communication and allowed meetings to run smoothly, no matter where employees were working. “Thanks to Microsoft Teams, we were ideally placed to communicate and connect with each other and with our customers during the coro- navirus lockdown,” said Daniel Höfelmann, the bank’s director or innovation management. And while Microsoft Teams has played pivotal role in helping financial services organisations through the pandemic, the solution is expected to bring far more than short-term change. Indeed, research suggests that up to 80 per cent of financial services employees’ time is spent on repetitive, manual tasks. With Microsoft Teams, financial services employees can accelerate their individual and group productivity to improve customer experiences, resolve business chal- lenges and drive efficiencies across common business processes. “Microsoft Teams facilitates a new world of productivity – and it does this in a way that other collaboration tools can’t,” explains Hamblin. “It F I NANC I A L S E R V I C E S